3. Extrusion

Chapter 3 shifts attention towards the landscapes from which these materials were extracted. Beginning from the early history of mining and metallurgy, this chapter examines developments in smelting and casting that allowed for increasingly toxic methods of extraction to become standard in copper and zinc mining over the course of the industrial age. The environmental costs of large-scale open pit copper and zinc mining are severe, as they regularly (and arguably invariably) contaminate groundwater for generations or, in some cases, in perpetuity (Gestring 2012). Mark Jarzombek addresses these symptoms of overgrowth in his “Quadrivium Industrial Complex” (Jarzombek 2021), referencing the relationship between exploding material production (most notably the quadrivium of concrete, steel, glass, and plastic) and waste, pollution, and overconsumption. By tracing their roots in toxic extraction methods, the sonic materiality voiced by modern brass instruments becomes increasingly problematic. Referencing recent literature on the practice of field recording and its complicated relationship to colonialism and extractive logics (e.g. Kanngieser 2023; Wright 2022; Ouzounian 2017), I will suggest that the building materials of our instruments and even of our cities give voice to their extraction and manufacture. The quadrivium of materials that surround us in contemporary urban life echo the traumas of their production, enacting a form of acoustic filtration of the urban acoustic soundscape. In returning to this troubling realization at the smaller scale of modern brass instruments, this chapter will close by suggesting that material complicity in our sounding environment is not an entirely innocent activity, and that any attempt to address material agency in sound must also account for the extractive violence in which these materials’ ontogenies are rooted.